Your time is limited as a developer but, in the fast-paced tech world, keeping your skills up-to-date is now more important than ever before. Having the right skills is key to ensuring that you stand out and stay relevant to grab the very best opportunities in the current IT job market. In this article, we list the top skills that a developer needs on their CV to be cutting-edge in 2015 and land their dream job.

If your CV already ticks the right boxes, then ensure that you plan your job search effectively before you start. You will also want to ensure that such high-value experience is listed clearly on your CV and across your social media profiles, especially now that employers are using social recruiting tools to find the very best niche talent.

1) Knowledge of Javascript frameworks

Javascript frameworks such as AngularJSandKnockoutJS have become a hug hit over the last couple of years. AngularJS developers are in high demand, as enterprise applications are now being built entirely from scratch using this single framework in combination with web APIs.

2) DevOps knowledge

More and more businesses now realise the need to adapt faster to ever changing customer demands and make incremental changes in a fast manner. Implementing a DevOps solution across the business enables continuous software delivery and faster delivery of features. More deployments mean faster time to market. Some of the DevOps automation skills that are in high demand include Chef andPuppet and scripting experience using Ruby or Python.

3) Agile development

Gone are the days when projects are executed in a waterfall model. Agile development promotes early delivery, continuous improvement and faster response time to changes. Developers who have experience of working in an Agile environment, be it Scrum orKanban, are preferred in the current market.

4) Version control systems and issue tracking

Open source version control systems have taken the market by storm over the last year. There are a number of players in this space to watch out for with, Atlassian being one of the major ones. Atlassian has a suite of tools that enable development teams to work effectively in an Agile environment, which have become hugely popular recently. Such tools are:

Continuous integration helps to improve software quality and reduce risk, as problems can be identified much earlier on in the development cycle. TeamCity, from JetBrains, is one of the popular continuous integration tools currently in high demand.

6) Mobile app development

Experience of developing iOS and Android apps is an added bonus as the number of vacancies for app developers are of course increasing year-on-year at present.

7) Cloud development & deployment

As well as experience of developing for the cloud, knowledge of various cloud technologies such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure and deployment experience helps in getting the best salaries/rates in the current IT market.

8) Big data & NoSQL databases

Experience of working with big data technologies such as Hadoop and MapReduce as well as NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Cassandra are some of the most sought after development skills and fetch the top salaries/day rates.